OHCHR in Cambodia

Profile

The UN Human Rights Office in Cambodia provides technical advice to national institutions based on human rights assessments; conducts capacity-building for a range of governmental and non-governmental actors to strengthen the promotion and protection of human rights; and works closely with the UN Country Team and other actors to integrate human rights into their work in order to support sustainable peace and inclusive development in Cambodia.

Thematic pillars

• Increasing implementation of the international human rights mechanisms outcomes
• Integrating human rights in sustainable development
• Strengthening rule of law and accountability for human rights violations
• Enhancing & protecting civic space and people’s participation

Achievements

• UN Human Rights has helped Cambodian civil society emerge as part of the reconstruction of the country. We have raised and continue to raise awareness on rights and trained civil society organisations to better monitor, fact-find, analyse and report on human rights issues. While facing shrinking space, Cambodian civil society is sophisticated and actively interacts with the international human rights mechanisms. Civil society organizations often express the importance of UN Human Rights providing a safe space and advocating for changes on complicated rights issues in support of civil society voices.
• UN Human Rights engagement with the criminal justice sector positively affected the lives of Cambodians in contact with the law. Cambodian courts released tens of inmates held beyond their sentence after our interventions. We helped decrease the backlog of prisoners pending appeal, with no more prisoners pending appeal for more than ten, seven or even five years. Prisoners regularly indicate that the prison conditions and treatment improve in concrete ways after visits of UN Human Rights officers.
• Engagement on law and policy reform helps to align laws to human rights standards. Recent assistance has been in the area of the drafting of the legal aid policy and the access to information law, yet to be adopted. UN Human Rights advocacy has been seeking to simplify the process for indigenous communities to obtain community land titles. Advocacy helped remove several contentious issues in the 2015 Law on Associations and Non-Governmental Organizations.
• UN Human Rights successfully supported efforts by 31 indigenous peoples’ communities to secure collective land titles. We also provided legal aid to communities that had been subjected to alleged land rights violations.